Marks on the page.

Some of my favourite work won't  really be for consumption by others as it doesn't really shape up as a work. It's my sketches of people passing in the street.

They work simply. I get a coffee and a window seat, open my A6 size pad and sketch random faces and bodies as they pass. The results sprawl across the page, overlapping and varying in accuracy. Sometimes it's the face that is spot on, other times it's the attitude or sense of movement that captures the passerby. 

I doubt any of the people would recognise these as portraits, though there is a definite sense of place and purpose in the sketches. I love them partly due to my own nosiness into the lives of others, and partly because they sum up a place and the variety of its people. Nobly heads, grace, gallump, pace and ponder, hurry and hesitation, carefree and anxious; these are all the qualities that show as people move from a to b, occasionally stopping for a coffee. 

As the day changes, so too the posture and the expression, faces screwing up and bodies hunching as the rain begins and blossoming out with a break in the clouds, relaxing and setting as the time for work goes and comes. The wider society written in the body. 

Are these Art - I think so, but they don't present as finished objects - pages in a small sketch book with fragments of people scattered across the page un-thought out, yet forming their own sense of logic as shape and distance arrange the figures and faces within the composition. Some figures are detailed, others merely a few lines - some faces are caught, others tell all in the shrug of their shoulders. Eyes, noses and mouths are optional, legs a luxury and hands unheard of. Yet these are defiantly people - an essence, a resilience, a vulnerability; an expression of what makes us more than our component parts.

It is the randomness that attracts me I think. On these pages sit people who know nothing of each other side by side, they contrast, reflect, reassure and expose qualities in those around them. Idiosyncrasies are the order of the day, and such juxtapositions - happy accidents that they are, are the delights that spring from these marks on the page.